I guess I’ll call you a heretic
. I can think of a few reasons you’d want to know the wind speed at all: (1) measure your performance against expectations; (2) know what to expect the conditions to be if you change course; (3) know when to reef; (4) bragging about the gale you were in. For all of those except maybe (3) TWS is what matters. For (1) polars are universally in TWS, and even if you don’t have polars if your sails are badly trimmed going upwind and you’re going slow, you could just think “that’s because the wind is so slow”, but the AWS is just low because you’re not going forward as fast as you should. You need a boat speed independent way of measuring the conditions to know how fast you should go. For (2) If you’re going upwind and want to estimate how fast you’ll go on a run, to know how long it’ll take to go home, you’ll want to know that you’ll be running in 8 knots of true wind, not the 12 knots of wind that you see apparent going to windward. For (3) I think some multihulls might have sail limits based on apparent wind, but otherwise most reefing is done by true wind or feel. For (4) bragging about apparent wind speed if you’re on a fast spinnaker run wind wouldn’t be nearly as impressive as using true wind speed, and bragging about apparent wind speed going upwind would be a little disingenuous.
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